30 die as bus to Shirdi falls into rivulet

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Hyderabad/Aurangabad:
A pilgrimage turned into a tragedy for devotees headed to the holy town of Shirdi from Hyderabad when the bus they were in rolled into a deep, dry rivulet early Saturday, killing 30 people and injuring 17 others.
    The accident occurred near Jalkot on Solapur-Omerga NH in Osmanabad district, about 350 km from Aurangabad at around 2.30am. Most of the pilgrims travelling in the semisleeper Volvo bus were residents of Andhra Pradesh. Nine TCS techies among 30 killed in bus accident
Hyderabad/Visakhapatnam:
Big dreams and promising IT careers of nine trainees of Tata Consultancy Services’ Hyderabad campus were cruelly cut short on Saturday when the bus they were aboard en route to Shirdi plunged off a bridge.
    The nine techies were among the 30 people who were killed when the semi-sleeper Volvo bus run by Vijaywada-based tour operator, Sree Kaleshwari Travels, plunged into a rivulet, near Jalkot on Solapur-Omerga national highway in Osmanabad district in Maharashtra early Saturday.
    There were 13 TCS employees in the bus. While the condition of one TCS employee is learnt to be critical, three were understood to be out of danger. All of them were recruited by TCS last year from the Maharaja Vijayaram Gajapathi Raj College of Engineering at Vizianagaram in coastal Andhra. They had joined the company only in March this year, TCS sources confirmed.
    “They were all part of the company’s initial learning programme and were based out of the HiTech city campus,” a company official confirmed. TCS has a total of 20,000 headcount in Hyderabad.
    Expressing deep condolences, TCS Hyderabad’s regional head and vice-president V Rajanna termed the incident as shocking and said the company was providing all the necessary support to families of the victims.
    While the bus operator in Hyderabad pleaded innocence, district officials at Osmanabad blamed rash driving for the mishap. “The accident was caused due to negligent and rash driving. The passengers had warned him against driving fast but the driver ignored them,’’ said Ravindrasinh Pardeshi, the additional superintendent of police, Osmanabad. The district administration dispatched 22 bodies to Osmania General Hospital from Jalkot primary healthcare centre after the postmortem was completed.
    A police team from Naldurg was patrolling the area when they spotted the crashed bus. “They had to virtually cut the wreckage with whatever tools they could get at that time to rescue the passengers,” Pardeshi said.